


Who Let You In?

by birdbrains



Series: Eat Rotten Fruit [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Consent Issues, Food, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Obedience, Sneaky trauma, Trauma, Triggers, Up all night to get Bucky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-21
Updated: 2017-03-21
Packaged: 2018-10-08 13:00:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 19,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10387191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/birdbrains/pseuds/birdbrains
Summary: “Is he here?” Sam asked.“I don’t know,” said Steve. “I’m—hey, Bucky, are you here? Can you hear me?”“Or whatever you prefer to be called,” Sam put in.“Yeah,” Steve said. “It’s me, that dumb guy with all the problems? Remember me?”///New and "improved."





	1. No Adults Allowed

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for your patience if you’ve been reading and waiting on this series a while. The new parts are mainly in the 2nd section (Eat Rotten Fruit from a Shitty Tree) if you don’t want to reread stuff you've already read. I really appreciate everybody who comments on, kudoses, or just lurkily reads this; I can’t list everyone who has left wonderful comments but I want to thank [fannishliss](http://archiveofourown.org/users/fannishliss) who was the first person to comment when I started posting this and whose comments are so great to read and answer. Also thanks to my writing party friends [ibroketuesday](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ibroketuesday) and [civilsmile](http://archiveofourown.org/users/civilsmile) without whom I wouldn’t have gotten it together to finish this.
> 
> To avoid breaking up the chapters with long warnings, I wrote a general warning for the Eat Rotten Fruit series that I posted as chapter 7 of this section, and will be giving short warnings at the beginning of chapters where it’s relevant.
> 
> And if you find yourself hankering for the days of old ERF, where Sam finds out about Bucky's food triggers 3 or 4 times and the characterization is all over the map, here it is: [Old ERF](http://archiveofourown.org/series/687585).

“Put on whatever makes you attractive  
If it’s not you, then do it for the sake of fashion  
Your friends like a certain you—that’s who you’ve got to be”  
—Pedro the Lion, “When They Really Get to Know You They Will Run”

 

Steve had read the file a million times and as masochistic as it sounded to say, it just wasn’t long enough. It was mostly missions, or the traces of them—things they’d made Bucky do—or records of his physical abilities. But Steve already knew how strong Bucky was and how well he could fight.

They also had records of how fast Bucky’s bones could mend themselves, and how fast he could recover from various illnesses. That gave Steve a little of what he was looking for, which was just what it had been like for Bucky, how they’d controlled him, just—well, sort of what he’d woken up to every day, when he was the Soldier. Not that they woke him often.

Obviously, it was a file, not Bucky’s diary, so what did Steve expect? He had to pick around for little pieces—Bucky’s expressions in pictures, the way he didn’t usually have much in the way of clothes; the fact that in the oldest pictures he looked like he was starving and—was anyone even changing the bandages on his stump?

“So looking at this over and over is helping you how?” Sam said. He was pretty open that he didn’t want to pore over the file himself, especially not the pictures. He could handle gore if someone actually needed help from him, but he said desensitization was kind of bullshit. He didn’t watch violent movies unless the violence looked really fake. _Monty Python and the Holy Grail_ was okay.

“I’m trying to figure out what he went through—“

“So you can predict what he’ll be like when we find him? You really can’t, man. You can’t figure that out about anyone and the chemicals coursing through your super-brains make it all even weirder. Just put the torture porn away and let’s have some tequila sunrises without the tequila.”

It was nice having a friend who didn’t drink either—funny that it was for the opposite reason. On Sam’s medication a beer was like a normal person downing a whole bottle of vodka. Well, he said that; Steve wasn’t sure that was really true. Sam had also said that he wasn’t great at stopping.

Sam poured himself a little orange juice and a whole lot of grenadine. “You can eyeball your own, I guess,” he said. “So are you trying to predict what we find, like, is it going to be the guy who ripped both of us apart or is he going to remember you, or is he going to just be really confused, but not too violent? Because I’m not sure we should just plan for the likeliest outcome. You have to be ready for every possible—“

“Ugh, sergeants,” Steve said. “I know. But I wasn’t...I wasn’t thinking practically.” He chugged some grenadine out of the bottle.

“That’s disgusting!” Sam said.

“It’s not like I have any germs.”

“Um, that’s not how it works, you probably have _super_ germs.”

“I don’t think that’s how it works either,” Steve said, “but I guess neither of us is a doctor.”

He caved and poured the grenadine into one of Sam’s cups with cartoon characters on them. They weren’t even at Sam’s house—they were in a hotel in Wyoming. Sam just carried those things around, like a kid with a stuffed animal. It was nice, actually. Sam was always surrounded by the detritus of Sam. He had a whole habitat springing up around him all the time.

“I mean, I’m not thinking about...plans for when we meet him,” Steve said. “I guess I’m thinking about what kind of friend he’s going to need. I’m sort of worried I’m gonna cry all over him and embarrass him.”

“But you never cry all over anything,” Sam said.

“I’m sort of afraid I might lose it,” Steve admitted. He was really tired. “I don’t—I guess—“ He rolled his head around on his neck like setting his brain at a different angle was going to make him a better communicator. Fat chance. “I don’t want to embarrass him—except I don’t know if he’s still the kind of person who gets embarrassed. Maybe they made it so he can’t anymore. Most of all I just feel like, it’s going to be hard to help without knowing what he’s been through—“

“—but he might not remember,” said Sam.

“Even if he does,” Steve said. “I mean, if it was me, I’d just put it out of my head, never want to tell anybody, as soon as I was halfway together.”

“Yeah, maybe don’t tell him that,” Sam said.

“I just wish I could already know it all,” Steve said. “I just don’t want—I don’t want there to be awkward moments.” Sam stared at him. “No, spit it out, you obviously have something to say.”

“It’s just—uh, Steve, even as a licensed batshit detector I’m a little amazed by what you just said? Your nice normal friend from the forties has been weaving in and out of the twentieth century as...well, not to be blunt, but...” Sam twisted his mouth around.

“Killing people, yeah, I noticed,” Steve said.

“So even aside from what they’d have to do to him to make him obey them, there’s the fact that he was forced to kill people. Don’t you think that’s...I mean, don’t you think there’s going to be some awkward moments?”

Steve thought about it. “Bucky won’t like that,” he said.

“Well, no, probably not,” Sam said. “He’ll forget all about it once we hook him up with some grenadine, though.”

///

Steve tried again, the next day, when Sam was driving them through Arizona. It was only the second time Steve had ever been there. The first time had been a lot more fun. “It’s not that killing people isn’t awkward,” he said, “I mean, it’s not that it isn’t worse, but it’s not exactly _awkward_.”

“And awkward is worse than killing people,” Sam said.

“You got it!” Steve said. He peered at Sam. “Are you making fun of me?”

“I’m just trying to understand, I guess,” Sam said. “Well, externally. Inside I am making fun of you.”

Steve looked out at the choppy mountains and began to—well. It wouldn’t hurt to talk about it (or so Sam claimed—Steve was suspicious). “The other time I was in Arizona, like I told you, I was on tour,” he said. “I remember how excited I was to see all these parts of the country when—well, first of all, hadn’t ever been out of New York much, and definitely not far. But I also could see a lot better. It sort of had annoyed me before, how I wanted to draw but people were always telling me it didn’t look right because I was colorblind—plus I was nearsighted so everything in the foreground could be perfect but I’d end up drawing backgrounds and faraway objects as just blurs. Or I’d try to draw them from pictures but I couldn’t get it right. Couldn’t make it look real, you know?”

“Not really. I have great vision, but keep going.”

“Well, being able to see all these places for the first time, and with them looking so clear—where before, even if I’d been there to see them, I wouldn’t have seen the details—it was amazing. It felt like a miracle.”

“It still feel miraculous this time around?” Sam asked.

“I mean...” Usually Steve would have said yes—he felt like saying was believing, that there was no point acting sad on the outside because it only encouraged your insides to become even sadder. But Sam knew, unfortunately, always. “There’s not as many things I like that much anymore. And I end up remembering how I was missing Buck then, too, except then I was thinking he’d probably love to see this, and now I’m thinking he’s seen it. That he’s been a lot of places without me. I have to get out of the car.”

“Can you wait a minute?”

“Sure,” Steve said—not sure if it was a lie, but there he still was, contained in his body, when Sam finally found a vacant lot and leaned against the car and watched Steve run a bunch of circles around him. Steve didn’t tire, but he filed down the angry spitty feeling that had taken up the top layer of his body. Hadn’t been there, hadn’t been there, hadn’t—

Things had been more ambitious, earlier. They had been in Switzerland which looked enough like Austria that Steve felt himself far away—drowsy, distracted, still. Not a good look on him, Sam said. But when Steve told Sam about watching Bucky fall, Sam had to go for a walk. “What a fucking...what a pair we are,” Sam had said, ineffectually, when he came back to the hotel. “You think we should’ve brought an actual adult human being on this road trip of doom?”

“Where’s the fun in that,” said Steve.

“Sounds lame, right?” Sam sat down on the hotel bed and put his head down between his knees.

“If it’s bad for you, don’t do it,” Steve said. “No hard feelings.”

Sam snapped his head up. “Don’t even.” Suddenly, he snickered.

“What is it?”

“Just wondering if you ever said anything like that to yourself. ‘If it’s bad for you, don’t do it.’”

“No,” Steve said. “Bucky did.”

“Oh, so that’s why you’re such a—“ Sam windmilled his hands around.

“Such a what?”

“Such a—“ Sam windmilled his hands again.

“Don’t be shitty when I’m giving you the adventure of a lifetime.”

Sam laughed and laughed at that, but he said, “I don’t think you should be here anymore.”

“But he might be here,” Steve said. “I have no right.”

“If it’s bad for you, don’t do it,” Sam said in a singsong voice.

And much later, in Wyoming, Steve asked, “Is being friends with me bad for you?”

Sam said, “I have the right to remain silent. You’re not boring, I’ll give you that.”

///

There weren’t all that many places that he had been kept—he wouldn’t be much of a secret if there were. The bank vault in DC; the house in Switzerland that wasn’t really a house; and now, the base in Arizona, built right into the side of a mountain. It was abandoned.

“It’s not abandoned,” Sam said. “There shouldn’t be electricity, but someone’s set it up.”

Steve was embarrassed that he hadn’t noticed, but the lights were turned off. Sam had noticed because the air conditioning was on.

“I don’t hear anything, but I’m just a mere mortal,” Sam said. “How about you?”

Steve thought about it. When you hear really well but you’re also a little desperate or scared, it’s not that much better than hearing badly. Recently Steve had imagined a dying person crawling down the hall of his apartment building, his throat slit, gurgling his last breath, whimpering. It was birdsong. Against his better judgment he’d called Sam, who was kind to him even though Steve wasted almost his whole morning. “I hear something, but it could be squirrels, something like that,” Steve said. “If there’s anyone here, they’re _really_ quiet.”

Sam said, “Well, it’s not like the type of person who squats at a Hydra base would tend to be quiet and sneaky.” Steve chuffed.

It was possible that there wouldn’t be anything left from when the Soldier had been kept there. But it soon turned out there was. Just a few doors from the entrance was a room with one of those chairs. Steve sat in the chair and surveyed the room.

“Oh, don’t do that,” Sam said. “That’s fucked up.”

“I like it,” Steve said. He hadn’t gotten a chance to sit in one of the chairs before—well, in the bank vault he’d been with too many people, and in Switzerland the chair had been removed. It had been attached to the floor, but someone had ripped it out.

Steve leaned back in the chair and tried to imagine what the machine had looked and sounded like when it was on. He had only seen pictures. “I wonder if he remembered he was going to have his memory erased. Do you think he was scared, or he was just curious what was going to happen?”

“What kind of question is that? Nobody ever said electric shocks to the head feel nice. I don’t even think it’s a fetish.”

“I know it hurt, but what if he didn’t remember what it was until it started hurting?”

Sam’s face twisted. “Steve, man, get out of that chair, please? It’s freaking me out.”

But Steve didn’t want to. He liked sitting somewhere Bucky had sat; it felt almost like he was looking out of Bucky’s eyes or like he could reach back and tell him he was coming, that it wasn’t going to go on forever. But Sam looked almost sick to his stomach, so Steve got up.

In the next room there was a cryo tank. “Well, this place is easy to navigate,” Sam said.

“He couldn’t walk right when he came out,” said Steve. “I mean, that part I do know about. Jesus, unfreezing hurts. Like the pain is inside your skin, and your ears.” He rubbed his hand against the window of the tank, looking at his reflection. “They waited until he could hobble, and then they had just a few minutes to march him into the room with the chair. Because sometimes he’d get—erratic, they’d say—but I think he was remembering and he’d start trying to fight them. So they had to get him in there while he was still stiff.”

“The tank’s unplugged,” Sam said. “It won’t be cold in there now.”

“Yeah,” Steve said. He opened the door.

“Oh,” Sam said. They both went down on their knees; there was a sleeping bag and a wadded up sweatshirt on the floor of the tank.

“Could just be a vagrant,” Steve said, stroking his hand along the soft, frayed edge of the sleeping bag.

“Yeah, I don’t think so. Only a tiny person could even lay flat in here. Most guys would have to kind of—“ Sam hunched himself up to give the impression—“sleep sitting up—sort of curled in a ball. There’s lots of other more comfortable places to sleep in this base.”

“Yeah, and also this is my sweatshirt,” Steve said, holding it up.

“How can you tell?” Sam said. It was just an ordinary gray sweatshirt.

Steve lifted the label and there was a little smiley face drawn on there with Sharpie. He put it in a lot of his clothes; he’d just liked the concept of smiley faces when he found out about them, and it reminded him to try to be positive. “I wonder when he got this. Maybe when I was still in the hospital.” It was kind of funny to think of Steve’s sweatshirt traveling all the way to Arizona without him.

(When Steve was a kid and went places by himself, people would say, “Where’s your co-pilot?” At the time it had made him angry. He went lots of places by himself.)

He felt a rushing in his ears and stepped out of the room into the long hallway. He switched the lights off, and the rushing intensified. His hair prickled. It was similar to a feeling he had when praying, that God was in the room; differently similar to the sensation of waking up from a nightmare with a weight on his chest. Or sometimes, on missions, when he knew an enemy was coming before he heard them.

In short, he had no idea if his intuition was right or not. He had very good proprioception and hearing, yet he also was far too imaginative. Sam, standing behind him, put a hand on his arm; Steve shook it off. “Sorry,” he said.

“Is he here?” Sam asked.

“I don’t know,” said Steve. “I’m—hey, Bucky, are you here? Can you hear me?”

“Or whatever you prefer to be called,” Sam put in.

“Yeah,” Steve said. “It’s me, that dumb guy with all the problems? Remember me?” He imagined he could hear Bucky’s breathing filling all the rooms of the building. Really he knew that the Soldier could hold his breath past the point when an ordinary person would drown. It had been a regular drill for him.

“And it’s me, Sam, the guy whose wings you tore off,” Sam said. Steve laughed nervously. “No hard feelings.”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “I can’t imagine you’d think there’s any hard feelings, but—there’s not, Bucky, there’s not.” He swallowed heavily. “I just—we’d been looking for you, and—I hope you know I’d never try and catch you or bring you in, unless you were hurting innocent people, but I don’t think you’d do that. I probably couldn’t catch you anyway, not that—anyway, I just want to help. Maybe I could help you get your head straight and you could help me get my head straight—you always were good at that, and—“ He probably shouldn’t be saying things like that. Even if Bucky couldn’t be such a good friend anymore, Steve would still prefer to have him around. “I just, I need company. I mean, Sam has to sleep sometimes, and then he’s not there to listen to me complain about everything.”

“I hear you in my dreams,” Sam said. He hooked his arm around Steve’s shoulder. Steve sniffled, stupidly. He hoped Bucky didn’t hear that. “Is that everything?”

“Yeah,” Steve said.

Sam sighed. “Steve really loves you, Bucky,” he said, “whatever form you take, okay? He’s not going to hurt you, and let’s face it, it’s probably hard dealing with what happened to you all by yourself. I bet you miss him, too, what with taking that sweatshirt.”

“Don’t mention the sweatshirt!” Steve hissed, jerking away from him.

Sam looked at him like he was crazy.

They told the probably empty base that they would stay in town for another week. They told it their hotel room and they said they would also come back to the base every day at noon. As soon as they went outside and got in the car, Steve blew his top. “Why’d you have to mention all that emotional stuff? If I was Bucky I’d be too embarrassed to even look at me!”

“Well, sorry, but you were being so casual about it,” Sam said. He put on a gruff voice. “’Hey, Bucky, it’s all the same to me, but I _guess_ I could use the company if you _wanted_ to come out of hiding. I sure could use some help with the rent, since I don’t work for SHIELD anymore.’”

“Bucky and I aren’t like that,” Steve said. “I let him beat me half to death. If he remembers me at all, he doesn’t think I don’t care about him.”

“Who knows?” Sam said. “Doesn’t hurt just to say it. It’s definitely better than the alternative, where you stay buttoned up and people don’t find out you love them, so—“

“And what’s wrong with that?” said Steve. “What’s wrong with a little dignity? Sorry. But I don’t know. He probably wasn’t even there.”

“Well, then,” Sam said. “At least I got to embarrass some squirrels with my pathetic, no-holds-barred tsunami of feelings.”

“I’m really sorry,” Steve said.

“Oh, well,” said Sam, “it’s nothing I haven’t heard from you a trillion times before—which pales in comparison to Bucky, who’s probably heard that kind of bullshit like, ten trillion times.”


	2. Texas Roadhouse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> emetophobia warning

They argued, and then they had to get gas, and Steve found himself standing for several minutes in front of the gas station bathroom mirror, trying to arrange his face into a picture of calmness. He shouldn’t be hard on Sam. Sam could be kind of delicate, sometimes. He just had a whole different perspective on things. When Steve finally came out of the gas station, he thought that Sam was talking on the phone, probably spilling his guts to someone. Jesus, Steve must have really upset him. As he got closer, he saw that Sam wasn’t on the phone, and that made him feel even worse. “Since when do you smoke cigars?” Steve asked. “Reefer, maybe, but—“

“A _cigar_ , excuse me, this is a White Owl,” said Sam. “It tastes like candy. Want to try it?”

Steve tried it. It tasted like a cigar with a fake grape flavor.

“I used to smoke these all the time when I was in high school. Not so easy to get them overseas, but I did my best, then I quit when I came back.”

“You feeling stressed or something?” Steve asked. 

“Oh no,” Sam said and laughed; “I mean, oh yes, but I’m smoking this because a guy offered it to me. He had a pack of two, and he only wanted one.”

“That was nice of him,” Steve said. “I wonder how he knew you like them.”

“Well,” Sam said, “I was wondering that, too, we stood there smoking for a while, and then he says, ‘So where’s Steve? Did he fall in the toilet or something?’”

“You mean that’s what you were thinking?”

“No,” Sam said, “that’s what he said, and then I looked at him a little closer, I saw he was wearing gloves, and, you know, I shit bricks.”

“If that’s true, then why are you standing here telling me about it?”

Sam inclined his head in the direction of his car, in the backseat of which a shadow was sitting very still.

Steve didn’t even remember or feel himself moving; he was already across the lot, at the car, the sound of the door opening was already in his memory and he was sitting down in the seat next to Bucky, who looked at him wide-eyed and scooted away a little bit.

“Uh, don’t you want to sit on my other side?” he said.

“What?” Steve said.

“Wouldn’t you rather be on my right side,” Bucky said. His eyes were friendly, placid. He’d gotten a haircut.

“I don’t—why would I care what side I’m on?” Steve asked.

Bucky half smiled and said, “Well, typically people prefer to sit on my weak side. Weak _er_ side. But people feel safer not being next to the arm.”

“Well, you’re not going to hurt me, are you?”

Steve thought it was a rhetorical question, but Bucky’s eyes got even wider although, somehow, they still looked friendly. “No,” was all he said, and half smiled again.

“I don’t care what side I sit on,” Steve told him.

“Okay,” Bucky said.

“Your hair looks nice like that,” Steve said.

“I know,” Bucky said. “That’s why I cut it like that.”

It did look nice. Steve wasn’t too knowledgeable about haircuts—he’d been strongarmed into the one he currently had—but it was very short on the sides and longer on top. The sides looked fuzzy—Steve reached out to feel them, and Bucky tensed. Steve pulled his hand back. “Sorry.”

“No, it’s okay. Sorry,” Bucky said. He awkwardly reached across himself with his right arm to bring Steve’s hand back to his hair.

“I don’t care which hand you use,” Steve said.

“Okay,” Bucky said, and instead he used his metal hand to bring Steve’s fingers up to touch the side of his head. It was as soft as it looked. Bucky looked—curious, sort of, like Steve was a type of strange animal he hadn’t seen before. It wasn’t common, but it wasn’t the only time he’d ever looked at Steve that way. It got to the point where Steve would have brought his hand back—he just wanted to feel it, after all—but he didn’t because Bucky was still lightly holding his wrist. “I didn’t,” Bucky said, and swallowed and smiled gamely. “I wasn’t sure if you wanted to see me, after what I did, so I just—“

“Are you _serious_?” Steve said.

“Sorry,” Bucky said, and he did let Steve’s arm go then, so he could gesture. “I didn’t—well, at first I couldn’t make sense of what I remembered—and then, you know, it’s been a while, and I—I smashed your face in. I mean, if it was me—I don’t socialize with people who almost kill me. I mean, not if I can help it.”

The half-smile again; Steve was mentally cataloguing it as the only really unfamiliar thing about Bucky so far. The expression looked shy, and since Bucky wasn’t shy, the only time he made shy expressions was when he was working on people. Steve could see why he did it—it was very endearing—but he didn’t want Bucky to feel like he had to be shy with Steve or work on him either. “I think almost killed you myself, when it comes down to it,” he said.

“What?” Bucky looked startled, before he got it; then he said, “Aw, no, Steve, it wasn’t remotely like that. I slipped, is all.” He grinned.

They both laughed and tears sprang to Steve’s eyes, mostly because he missed laughing with someone that way. He felt a little less embarrassed than he would have with anyone else. At least he did until Bucky said, “Aw, Steve,” and started trying to wipe the tears out of Steve’s eyes.

“Shut up,” Steve said smashing his hand against his face. “I just, I didn’t remember you were funny. I thought you were kind of humorless and bland.”

“You wouldn’t even be looking for me if I wasn’t funny,” Bucky said. He got the soft strange animal look and said, “So you missed me, huh?”

“What was your first clue,” Steve said, trying and failing to get himself together.

///

When Sam got in and started driving, at first he started asking Bucky how he was feeling, if he’d been sleeping, if he was hungry, and other Sam type questions. Steve was a little regretful he hadn’t asked those questions, because Bucky started nattering away familiarly. Pretty soon he was talking about something completely different, but not before they’d decided to go to a Texas Roadhouse that Sam and Steve had passed on the way into the state.

“Shit, I forgot to ask if you had any other stuff we needed to get from the base,” Sam said, as he pulled into the parking lot.

“You probably forgot ‘cause you correctly surmised I don’t have anything,” Bucky said. “My pack’s in the trunk, that’s everything I need. I really just need shampoo and conditioner and—well, I _have_ guns and explosives, but that’s really gilding the lily, I mean look at me. On the other hand my hair doesn’t wash and style itself, which is unacceptable.”

Steve almost fell over laughing as he got out of the car. The funniest part was that Sam thought Bucky was joking about how much he cared about his hair, but he got set _very_ straight as Bucky was rummaging around in his pack so he could bring a gun into the restaurant. “I had a Mohawk at first, when I first got out,” Bucky said as he weighed a small Glock in his hand and tucked it with some bullets into the inside pocket of his flattering jacket. “You guys know what that is? I looked _good_ , and nobody ever would’ve recognized me. Steve, don’t get mad, but I actually passed you on the street and you didn’t see me, before I got out of DC. But out here, you know, it was wilting in the sun. So I went for this.”

He pulled his gloves on as Sam locked the car. They were really soft looking motorcycle gloves. If Steve hadn’t known better he would have just thought they were part of the outfit.

“Doing my hair’s the best thing about being out of there,” Bucky continued as they all walked across the lot, but Steve found himself just stopping and staring at Bucky with a dopey expression. He could just feel how dopey he looked. “They practically _never_ washed my hair,” Bucky said. “It was so greasy, and the _bangs_ —it was like wearing a carpet made out of oil. Hey, Steve, pal, there’s moss growing on you. Bring it in.” Steve was embarrassed but Bucky just stood in the middle of the parking lot with his arms outstretched until Steve went over to him and let him hug him. Bucky hugged Steve very gently, but all the air went out of him anyway. It wasn’t an unpleasant sensation. He felt Bucky put his nose into Steve’s neck and he heard him inhaling; then Bucky squeezed him tighter and whispered, “Talk about greasy hair—I know you’re on the road, but you never tried dry shampoo? You got to take advantage of this future business.” He released Steve and said, “Sam, what are you doing over there? You too dignified for this kind of thing?”

Steve looked and saw that Sam was now the one standing and staring at Steve and Bucky.

“Come on, group hug,” Bucky said. “That’s what you call it, right?” When Sam hesitated Bucky put up his palms. “Look, I see why you wouldn’t want to hug me but I wouldn’t hurt anyone, I swear. And Steve can take me out if I do something wrong, right, Steve?”

Sam looked pretty shocked and said, “No, it’s not—I know. It isn’t anything like that.”

Bucky gave Sam a long look and just went over and put his right hand on his back, leading him across the final third of the parking lot. “Okay, onto more pressing matters. How come Steve spends so much time in the bathroom and yet he still smells bad? What is he doing in there?”

Once they finally made it into the Texas Roadhouse, Steve—contrary to certain people’s accusations—was forced to wait for thousands of years for Bucky and Sam to come out of the bathroom so the hostess could seat them. He hoped she didn’t think they weren’t really going to eat there and were just tricking her so they could use the bathroom. With an apologetic look, he went to check on them only to find Sam waiting patiently as Bucky fixed up his hair in the mirror. Well, Bucky would have said he was fixing it—Steve would have said fussing, since it already looked fine.

“I mean, you threw yourself in pretty undeniably, the way I see it,” Bucky was saying. “Don’t think you can bow out now.”

Sam said, “Bucky was telling me I’m stuck with you guys.”

“Isn’t he, Steve?” Bucky said. “I mean, he saved you a bunch of times, and he came _here_ with you, when for all he knew I was gonna be rabid. He’s been laughing at my jokes, too, which pretty much qualifies him for sainthood.”

“Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” Sam said.

“I would,” Steve said.

“I mean, I wouldn’t go as far as to say I’ve been laughing—it’s more like wincing while hastily expelling air. It’s really just a complicated sigh.”

“Nobody can really do better,” Steve said. “He’s really just not funny—sorry, Buck. But yeah, you’re family, that’s not really up for debate.” Then Sam did wince.

“Well, we do all look like we’re related,” he said.

“Oh, come on,” Bucky said. “Brothers under the skin.”

“I always thought that was creepy,” Sam said. “Like you have to peel off someone’s skin before you can relate to them?” Bucky blanched but Sam said, “Hey, no problem. It is an honor, you know, to be in a boat with you guys.”

“Well, that’s laying it on a little thick,” Steve said. “You should be getting a condolence card.”

“No, not really,” Sam said. He squeezed Bucky’s arm and said, “So, remember when I said I was really hungry?”

“I mean, I’m objectively hungrier than both of you,” Steve said. “Well, maybe not Bucky. How hungry are you, Buck?”

“It’s complicated,” Bucky said and went quiet as the hostess showed them to their booth. Steve noticed that Bucky was careful to sit with his left arm on the inside. He slid in next to him, even though it was kind of a tight squeeze, and was rewarded when Bucky smiled and bumped him on purpose with his shoulder.

“I got a file on you,” Steve said, “and they mentioned they didn’t really—feed you, right?”

“Uh, yeah,” Bucky said.

“I didn’t know if you might have trouble adjusting to solids, or eating by mouth at all, so I—well, I have some Ensure in the car, but also some—well I didn’t know what kind of feeding tube you used, so I have a few different kinds—“ Sam was smiling at him. Steve shook his head, irritated.

“That’s so thoughtful of you, but I eat now,” Bucky said. Steve was embarrassed. “It’s pretty great how fast my stomach adjusted. When I left them I couldn’t remember ever eating more than a few bites of anything, and within a week I ate a whole chocolate cream pie.”

“That wasn’t your whole food for the week, was it?” Steve asked. Bucky rolled his eyes.

“ _No_ , Steve. I’m eating—a lot. And I carry food and protein shakes and stuff, so—“

“Yeah, that bag is _heavy_ ,” Sam said. “I knew it wasn’t all hair products in there.”

“I said to let me carry it to the car,” Bucky said.

“And I wanted to carry it, so get over it,” Sam said. “Now can you two be quiet so I can figure out what I want to eat?”

“Oh, it’s that hard for you?” Steve said, but he stopped talking and let him think. Sam decided on grilled salmon and mozzarella sticks. Steve got two kinds of cheeseburgers and a chicken sandwich.

Bucky ordered ten baked potatoes with no sour cream.

“Um, protein?” Sam said and Steve shot him a look—not in front of the waiter. But the waiter was confused too. Bucky looked like he wanted to shrink into the booth and disappear.

Steve bumped his knee under the table. “What, we’re Irish, that’s a normal meal for us,” he said. Bucky snorted.

“I had a protein shake,” he said. “It’s—I don’t need—“ He scanned the menu quickly, and pushed it over to the waiter, smiling up at him. “Yeah, there’s nothing in here that thrills me as much as a baked potato.”

“Can’t argue with that,” the waiter said.

“Thanks for humoring me,” Bucky said.

When the waiter went away, Steve was afraid Sam was going to start hassling Bucky about his nutrition, but he didn’t. He hadn’t meant to hassle him. Steve could have almost said the same thing. “Hey, they have liquor here,” he said, with a glance at Sam to make sure it was okay.

“Oh, you gotta get shitfaced to deal with the pain of being around me?” Bucky said.

“Hardly. Never liked the taste, and I can’t get drunk—and I’m guessing neither can you. But I thought maybe you’d like some whiskey.”

“Oh,” Bucky said. He looked startled. “I don’t—why?”

“Well, you like the taste, don’t you?”

“Yeah, it tastes good,” Bucky said.

“So maybe you’d like some. I mean, it might be fun if you want to.”

“If I want to,” Bucky repeated, like the words were in a foreign language.

“Yeah, do you want to get some?” Steve said.

Bucky looked really confused, past a point where Steve had any idea what he could be thinking. Then his expression seemed to clear and he said, “Yeah, okay, Steve, I’ll have it.”

Steve ordered the whiskey when the waiter brought the bread to their table, and it was there in a minute. Bucky picked up the glass and looked at it—he sloshed the liquid around. Then he did something strange—he pulled the breadbasket over to himself and started taking all the bread out and piling it on his plate. The three of them had already had a lot of it, but there were several pieces left. “Bucky, what’re you—“

Bucky glanced up quickly. “Do you not want me to—“

“Have all the bread you want,” Sam said. “We’re not exactly gonna be lacking for sustenance here.” Steve nodded in agreement.

When Bucky finished transferring the bread to his plate, he pushed the plate away, took a drink of whiskey, and leaned over and threw up into the breadbasket. Steve’s first thought was that Bucky wasn’t eating as much food as he said he was; it was mostly liquid. It was leaking out of the sides of the breadbasket.

“Oh my God, dude, are you okay?” the waiter cried, running over with some towels and cleaning fluid. Bucky wiped his mouth on a napkin he had ready. He didn’t look sick; he looked fine.

“I am so sorry, I got acid reflux,” he said. “It just happens sometimes. I’ll pay for the damage.”

“Don’t worry about that—it’s fine,” the waiter said. “Man, that sucks for you, though.”

“Nah, it’s not so bad,” Bucky said. “Thanks for being cool about it when I’m bringing down the character of your fine establishment.” He and the waiter both cracked up.

“You want to move to another table?” the waiter asked.

“No, this is fine,” Bucky said, but the table smelled awful.

“ _I_ want to move,” Sam said, so the waiter moved them a little ways away. When they had sat down again in the same configuration Sam said, “Bucky, look, lots of people have problems with food—anyone would if they barely ate anything for years—just say something’s gonna make you sick, it’s no big deal.”

“It’s not that,” Bucky said with a meaningful look at Steve, the meaning of which was utterly lost on him.

“I don’t—“ Steve said. “I don’t get it. Are you sick?”

“Of course I’m not sick,” Bucky said.

“You just threw up.”

“Because I had whiskey,” Bucky said. “I don’t _get_ sick, believe me.”

“You threw up because you had a little taste of whiskey? I don’t—“

“Because the taste of whiskey is a trigger that makes me throw up,” Bucky said, like he was talking to a child. “You said you had my file.”

“I have _a_ file. It doesn’t have that much in it.”

“Uh, okay,” Bucky said. He stopped talking when their food came; when the waiter left he started eating a potato like nothing had happened and said, “So what triggers do you know about?”

“It’s all Greek to me,” Steve said. “There was nothing about—whatever it is you’re talking about—”

“You don’t know about the triggers,” Bucky said. “Hoo boy.” He took another few bites and said, “It’s nothing big. They just conditioned me to respond a certain way to certain tastes. Sounds, too, but mostly tastes, since I didn’t eat so there was no chance of me running across them by accident.”

“So when you taste certain foods and drinks, you throw up?”

“And other stuff,” Bucky said. “Long list, not interesting dinner conversation, I promise. Sometimes I don’t remember it until I see the food—or _taste_ it. That’s fun. Oh, well. Price you pay for an interesting life.” He put away half the potato while he was talking and showed Steve the inside of his mouth.

“Ew,” Steve said.

“So that’s why the ten baked potatoes,” Sam said, “instead of any other food. Because it might have triggers in it?”

“You got it,” Bucky said. “And now that I threw up, I have even more room for all these great potatoes!”


	3. Mad Men

“So do you think...” Steve said meaningfully a few weeks later. Sam had asked him to come over and “explain _Mad Men_ to me.”

“But _Mad Men_ is in the sixties.”

“Well, you’re closer than me—and, you know, white?” Sam said. He didn’t even watch _Mad Men_. He sat in his armchair like an annoying cat, drinking some strange colored juice and looking meaningfully at Steve. Yet when Steve tried to get Sam to actually start talking, he said, “What, Steve? Do I think _what_?”

“You know, what do you think about...?” Steve gestured.

“ _What_?” Sam said. “You aphasiac?” He hit play on his DVR. “Okay, who’s that? Who’s that guy? Did they used to date? What’s a typewriter?”

“Sam, neither of us has ever seen this show before,” Steve said. “I never watched it because—I don’t know, how am I supposed to learn about shit if I’m watching a bunch of modern day people doing their impression of what they imagine their grandparents’ lives were like? Besides, everyone acts terrible. They don’t even have problems. They have more money than God and they don’t even enjoy it. They’re just rude.”

“So you have watched it,” Sam said.

“I mean, Bucky was probably unfrozen a few times in the sixties. Why don’t you ask him? He’s white too, you know.”

“Oh, now we’re cooking,” Sam said. He hit the pause button.

“Cooking _what_ ,” Steve said.

“It’s a figure of speech, Steve, come on.”

“Oh, really. I would never have guessed that you’re not actually cooking. What do you think about Bucky? Is he okay? I know he came over about four times to ‘help you organize your garage’ so I assume you talked to him.”

“No, we organized my garage,” Sam said.

“Neither of you is organized,” Steve pointed out.

“Yeah, that’s why he’s a good helper. If you were helping me, my self esteem would plummet to below freezing as you effortlessly color coded everything. Bucky and I were more on the same page.”

“Well, what did you talk about?” Steve said.

“ _Jersey Shore_ ,” Sam said.

“What else?”

“How he doesn’t like it.”

“ _Sam_ ,” Steve said. This was like pulling teeth. His own teeth. “Did you talk about—you know, _issues_?” He tapped himself on the brain.

Sam shrieked with laughter so that juice came out of his nose. “Ow!” he said. “Fuck.” He wiped his nose on the sleeve of his sweater. “Don’t judge, I’m gonna wash it, like, definitely this week. It’s a home sweater anyway.”

“Sam,” Steve said.

“Don’t wear my name out.” Sam sighed. “Okay. I’ll give you a break. You want to know what Bucky told me, what I observed about his behavior, and my professional opinion on all of it?”

“Yes!” Steve said, although once Sam put it that way it didn’t seem like a great way for Steve to be talking about his own best friend. It was just that his head was spinning.

///

He couldn’t figure out what it was that set him on edge. Well, he could, but everything seemed stupid. First he tried to say to himself that Bucky was too polite, but Bucky had usually been polite to people, much more so than Steve was. It was more a sort of quietness, except he was both as loud and as talkative as ever so that word didn’t make any sense.

One thing was when he showed Bucky around his apartment, and especially the room Steve had gotten ready for him a while back. Steve felt bad that the room was pretty small, and empty except for a bed and a chest of drawers. He couldn’t help the size of it—he used to use it for storage—but he hadn’t really known what to put in it. He hadn’t felt confident that he’d find Bucky, or that he had a sense for the kind of room Bucky would want to live in, although of course he didn’t say either of those things. He’d been wrong, after all. It turned out that he still had a pretty good sense for what Bucky would do and what he would like—although not for what he didn’t like. It seemed like there wasn’t much of anything Bucky didn’t like anymore. When Steve apologized for how small and cramped the room was—and it really was, especially compared to Steve’s room—Bucky just blinked at him in confusion. “It’s a really nice room,” he said slowly, like maybe it was Steve who was confused.

Which, okay, home was where the heart was, but Steve didn’t know what to make of Bucky asking if it was okay to use the towels in the bathroom. “It’s your apartment too,” Steve said.

“Okay,” Bucky said. “So I’m cleared to use the blue towel?”

Maybe one way to say it was that Bucky was acting like a guest, sort of. He didn’t need to. They’d been roommates twice in Brooklyn, and even when they weren’t they often had each other’s keys and came in without knocking. They would have shared clothes if it had been remotely possible.

Back then, Bucky used to come over to borrow a pen and a piece of paper, and yet a few days ago Steve had walked by the bathroom and Bucky was buzzing the sides of his head with manual clippers. It gave Steve kind of a shock, actually; he was pretty sure Bucky was using a brand Steve used to see all the time. It might even be the brand Bucky had used. “Where did you even get that?” he asked.

“I get them at antique stores,” Bucky said. “People don’t even know what they are.” He squeezed his mouth up, concentrating. He had mirrors set up so he could see the back of his head from multiple angles.

Steve hadn’t seen one of the old clippers in such a long time that he’d forgotten how slow they were. Bucky was having to put in a lot of effort to cut his hair as precisely as he wanted. Steve’s electric clippers, which would have been much quicker and easier, were sitting right next to the sink.

“Hey, have you tried using this one?” Steve asked.

Bucky paused. “No, this one works,” he said.

“I bet this would be easier,” Steve said. “Why don’t you try it?”

“You want me to use it?” Bucky said. It was a weird kind of question—it sounded like he couldn’t quite believe the words he was saying.

“Yeah, of course,” Steve said. At the time he thought maybe it was some kind of hair issue he didn’t get. Maybe Bucky thought his haircut wouldn’t look right if he didn’t do it with manual clippers (honestly, Steve sometimes thought Bucky preferred to shave and do his hair in the slowest possible way so he could look in the mirror for longer).

Bucky put down the manual clippers and picked up the electric ones. Once Steve showed him how they worked, it only took Bucky a minute to finish cutting his hair. He carefully put Steve’s clippers back and then stared at himself in the mirror.

“What do you think?” Steve asked.

“It looks good,” Bucky said quietly. “You were right.”

“What, you think I’d steer you wrong?” Steve said.

He didn’t realize until later that he’d kind of been setting up a joke. He expected Bucky to say yes and start making fun of Steve’s hair or his fashion sense. But instead Bucky said, “No, of course not.” He was looking in the mirror again.

Well, that was something you could always count on—Bucky looking at himself in the mirror. But these days Steve could also count on the whole guest business. Bucky went out and bought coffee instead of using Steve’s coffeemaker and mugs. He apologized for taking a long shower. It felt like as much as Steve tried to tell him he could feel comfortable, that this was his home, it didn’t make a dent in Bucky’s good behavior.

Also, he didn’t sleep in a bed and he lied about it. Of course, Steve couldn’t always sleep in a bed and he didn’t think it was a big issue. When Steve got up in the morning before Bucky, he could hear Bucky’s breathing through the wall, in the kitchen, and that meant Bucky was sleeping on the floor in the closet. It was probably kind of cramped for a guy his size, but it wasn’t really surprising given what they’d seen at the base and what he’d read in Bucky’s file. He probably hadn’t slept in a bed since the early forties, and it had been cells and cryo chambers more than it was tents.

The thing was that Bucky tried to hide it. He went as far as tangling up the sheets in his bed to make it look like it had been slept in. Steve would sit in the kitchen drinking coffee and he’d hear Bucky breathing in the closet, waking up, going out into his room to get ready; then twenty minutes later Bucky would come in talking about how comfortable the bed was. If Steve hadn’t had super hearing he’d have been convinced that Bucky was not only sleeping in his bed, but half in love with it.

Bucky kept washing the sheets, too, which was a waste of water. Steve would have said something about it— _hey Bucky, I know you sleep in the closet and I don’t care—_ but by the time he realized Bucky was intentionally hiding it, they’d been living together for a week and a half. Steve didn’t know why Bucky would be so self conscious about it—he wasn’t sure if it was part of the whole guest thing, like maybe Bucky thought it was rude to sleep in the closet when there was a bed provided, or if Bucky was just embarrassed about the way he needed to sleep. But Steve did know that he’d waited too long to bring it up; if Bucky wasn’t embarrassed about sleeping in the closet, he’d be embarrassed about working so hard to hide it.

That was the thing—Bucky cared what people thought about him, but God help you if he realized you knew that. It annoyed Steve a lot when they were kids, and really up until Europe. Steve didn’t mind that Bucky looked like a Greek god and endeared himself to everyone he met—and, shit, at the time it was no small thing that he could run without getting winded and make plans a month in advance without worrying he was going to have to cancel because he was hacking up a lung.

That stuff, Steve always wanted to be gracious about because Bucky was a good person. But it drove him crazy when Bucky pretended he didn’t work at it. One time Steve kicked Bucky in the shins after listening to him prattle on about how he had just “found” the jacket he was wearing and he couldn’t remember where. He’d spent a week’s paycheck on that jacket—yes, he’d skipped meals for a jacket, and he looked heartwrenchingly good, and he pretended it was an accident.

Steve felt different about it after Zola’s factory. It wasn’t like, oh, Bucky, now I see how hard it was for you being so healthy and good looking and having everyone like you. He just saw that it really got to Bucky when he wasn’t able to get himself together in front of people. It made Bucky mean, even, when he’d always been kind.

Maybe it was crazy for Steve to think there was anything similar going on now. It wasn’t like Bucky had just had a bad experience—he’d been _erased_ , he’d been denied everything that made a person a person. He’d been forced to kill more than fifty people and that was a conservative estimate. That was something he talked about even less than he talked about how they’d treated him—which he only did when he had to, like when he was explaining why he couldn’t eat certain foods. (He’d avoid telling Steve about what the taste triggers did; if Steve asked Bucky would give it up, but he never volunteered the information.)

It would have been ridiculous to expect Bucky to have the same trivial concerns about how he appeared to people. It just didn’t make sense—he’d had no control of anything about his appearance or personality for years. Or maybe that made sense after all. Steve could only theorize, because even the old Bucky wouldn’t have wanted to admit to caring about that stuff, and now he was so taciturn.

Well, he was only taciturn about—you know, _issues_. Bucky talked constantly and by any reasonable standard he was a great person to live with. He’d drag Steve by the arm over to the radio and try to get him to dance with him, all the while peppering him with questions about modern music so that Steve couldn’t imagine how Bucky was able to dance and talk at the same time. He’d go on and on about things he liked about the modern world, from hair products—honestly it was mostly hair products—to the new kinds of candy. “Almond Joy, truer words!” he crowed at Steve, bursting in the door while Steve was sitting and reading the worst part of the newspaper. “I just went to the filling station and look at this stuff I got! Did you hear about this Hershey’s Cookies and Cream deal?”

“It doesn’t really taste like cookies,” Steve said.

“Oh, really, a candy bar made of chemicals and junk doesn’t taste like real cookies, you better write them an angry letter,” Bucky said. “Here, try.”

Steve tried it. “It’s okay,” he said.

“Oh, come on. Well, I know you like mints.” Bucky produced a king size box of Junior Mints and shook it like a maraca. Steve was tempted. 

“We’ll share it,” he said. “I know you like them too.” A shadow passed quickly over Bucky’s face, leaving him as giddy and cheerful as before. Steve hadn’t gotten too far in his attempts to understand Bucky, but he already had learned that little look. “Oh, you can’t eat it,” he said.

“Right!” Bucky said.

“What’s it do?”

“Muscle weakness. Look, they make them in different colors for holidays.” Bucky pulled a Junior Mint out and squished it in his fingers to show Steve what the inside was like. “Isn’t that nice?”

“Why would they want your muscles to be weak?”

Bucky didn’t outright say he was annoyed, but he rolled his shoulders before he kept talking just as cheerfully. “For training. If I could complete a mission through force of will when I could barely stand up or lift my right arm, then when I was physically strong I’d be unstoppable. So, story of _your_ life, basically.”

“They sent you on missions when you couldn’t stand up?” Steve couldn’t understand why Hydra would risk Bucky’s life like that. Not that he was really tuned in to their motives.

“Easy missions,” Bucky said.

“But you could have died,” Steve said. Bucky shook his head. There was something Steve wasn’t understanding. “You couldn’t have died?”

“No, I couldn’t,” Bucky said. “They knew I’d find a way to complete the mission.” He looked away, but not like he was unhappy—more like he was bored.

“But what if you couldn’t complete it?”

“I could.”

“How?” Steve asked.

“Will,” Bucky said. He grinned at Steve, and speaking of will, Steve felt almost overpowered by Bucky’s desire to stop talking about any of this. It was like a physical force.

Actually, maybe that was what made Steve wonder the most. He wasn’t annoyed that Bucky didn’t want to talk about it, nothing like that—but in that moment he realized how good Bucky was at his own image management. Steve saw inconsistencies, but he didn’t see much; he saw cracks, but he didn’t see anything through them. He should have been able to pick up something—they’d known each other backwards and forwards, and if Bucky had changed too much for that to matter, they were still spending most of their time together. How could you hide that well from someone you lived with?

///

Steve worried that he was looking a gift horse in the mouth. Maybe that’s what Sam would tell him—that Steve was just constitutionally unable to be happy about good things. He’d spent so much time going through the file, trying to figure out what Bucky would be like, what Bucky would need, that maybe he _wanted_ something to be wrong with him.

“Okay, are you ready,” Sam said, and guiltily Steve nodded and waited for him to get on with it. “My professional opinion is...it’s a violation of therapist/patient confidentiality for me to tell you my opinion about a patient!”

“ _Sam_. He’s not your patient.”

“Oh. So you want my personal opinion as Bucky’s friend?”

Sam was smiling so annoyingly that Steve didn’t even have to wait for the answer. “Let me guess, you don’t talk about your friends behind their backs?”

“You got it! All joking aside, though—“

“As if,” Steve said. Sam probably had sixty more jokes he was wanting to pull out.

“—why would you even _care_ about my opinion? You live with the guy and you probably know him better than anyone. I’ve known him less than a month.”

“I don’t know him better. _Those_ people know him better,” Steve said, his heart sinking as he realized how true it was, but he ignored it. “Anyway, I just thought maybe he’d talk more to you about it, since you’re...” He wiggled his hands around. “More emotional?”

“Oh, fuck you too,” Sam said. “You know as well I do he’s not on the up and up...”

“No, I didn’t, that’s what I’m asking,” said Steve.

“Oh, oops, you did get some opinion from me,” Sam said. “My opinion is he’s probably as bad as you are, just in a different way. You know, like you were saying about the awkwardness thing. He’s really genuine but...” Sam paused. “He’s open in the sense that he wants to get to know everyone. I left him alone at Home Depot for like two minutes and when I get back, the guy helping us is unloading on Bucky about his marriage. Talking to him like they’ve known each other for years. But it’s not like Bucky wants anyone to get to know _him_ , at least not anything that isn’t funny. That’s not on the table.”

“Well, yeah, I already know that,” Steve said.

“I’m telling you, I don’t have anything to tell you,” Sam said. “Like—yeah, I think it’s unlikely that he doesn’t have anything bad going on. But it’s kind of a dick move for me to be trying to figure out what it is if he doesn’t want me to know.”

“I guess he doesn’t want me to know, either,” Steve said.

“Look, I really have no idea,” Sam said. “I swear I’m not trying to keep information from you—except, if I had any I still wouldn’t want to sit around dishing on him, okay?”

“Okay, okay,” Steve said. He really wasn’t the type of person to talk about a friend, and he felt bad about deviating from that when he was so much luckier than he had any right to be. But ever since Bucky came back to them Steve had had a feeling like something was caught in his throat. No, it wasn’t like if Bucky was trying to kill him, or if Bucky didn’t retain any of his old personality or memories. This was easy. But it was strange, too—everything went down so smoothly, except when it didn’t. It wore at him.


	4. Commercials of the Future

Steve slept badly a few days later. Well, he never slept well—of course he was always in top form anyway. On anyone else the lack of sleep would have started to show. But usually he just shocked awake a lot or couldn’t get to sleep in the first place. This wasn’t like that. He tried and tried to wake up, but he was paralyzed, both in the dream and in his bed. He could feel both at once.

He was with the Commandos when they got captured. He’d been taken away from them and restrained somehow—no, he was frozen, he was in a cryo tank. He wasn’t all the way frozen—he could hear and think, and he could move his mouth with great effort. He could speak a little, but it was barely above a whisper, and what was he supposed to say? “Hold on, I’m coming?” He _wasn’t_ coming. He couldn’t move at all, and he could hear them screaming and dying. _Fuck_ , he tried to get himself together, but he couldn’t move.

“Hey, hey, hey, Steve,” Bucky said—Steve could pick out all the individual voices, which was the worst part—he _knew_ when Morita and Gabe stopped screaming, he knew when Sam and Natasha stopped too—he wished Bucky wouldn’t call for him, wouldn’t say his name like Steve had ever been able to do a thing to help him—

“Hey, Steve, come on,” Bucky said, and he was pulling Steve, hauling him with his cold heavy arm. Steve blinked awake into his silent, dark room. Bucky clicked the lamp on at the lowest setting, so it didn’t hurt Steve’s eyes. But he could see where he was. He was sitting up—Bucky was supporting him with his metal arm, resting his warm right hand on Steve’s elbow. His face was pretty close; Steve could see Bucky studying him in the faint light. “Hi, Steve,” he said.

“Hi,” Steve said.

“You know who I am?” Bucky said.

“Of course I do,” Steve said. His voice cracked and he lunged at Bucky, burying his face in his neck and—well, he guessed he was inhaling the smell of him the way Bucky had done in the Texas Roadhouse parking lot. Bucky smelled like mothballs, surprise surprise. His metal arm was gentle, heavy around Steve’s waist. His other hand rubbed reassuringly between Steve’s shoulder blades. “Thank God you’re here.”

“Thanks, God,” Bucky said.

“I’m so sorry,” Steve said.

“Oh, you didn’t wake me up,” Bucky said. “I was reading.” Steve knew he was lying, but that wasn’t the point, it wasn’t what was squeezing him inside.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come get you,” Steve said. “God, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I let that—I’m sorry they—I would never—“

“Oh, that’s no big thing,” Bucky said. “Don’t worry.”

“It _is_ a big thing,” Steve said. “Why would you—“

Bucky wrenched away from him so quickly that he almost knocked Steve out of the bed. He put his palms up, smiling. “Sorry,” he said. “I need coffee. Please say you’ll make me some—you know that machine confuses the hell out of me.”

“Sure,” Steve said. He sure had no right to demand comfort from Bucky about what Steve had let happen to him.

Bucky hopped up, away from Steve, and went out of the room. Steve got up slow—he could have had help if he hadn’t upset Bucky—and followed him into the kitchen. Bucky was adjusting his hair in the door of the microwave. “Thanks,” he said.

“Want me to show you how to use the machine?” Steve said.

“Okay,” Bucky said. He leaned against the counter and watched as Steve poured coffee and water into the machine and explained how it worked.

“The coffee grounds are here, and you put them in here,” Steve said. They’d had this exact conversation so many times. Steve would try to tell Bucky that it was okay for him to use the coffeemaker; Bucky would go through a whole routine about how he was afraid he might break it. Bucky could operate a million kinds of weapons and vehicles, but he was apparently helpless in the face of a simple coffeemaker. Okay.

It wasn’t a big deal, but it made Steve feel like he was going crazy. He’d showed Bucky how to use the coffeemaker over and over, yet Bucky still acted afraid to use it. It wasn’t even expensive. Steve wouldn’t even care if Bucky did break it.

“You don’t sleep too well, do you, Steve?” Bucky said, gently, when Steve had started the coffee.

“No, I sleep fine,” Steve said.

“I guess nobody’d know if you don’t,” Bucky said. “It doesn’t get to us the way it does to other people, does it?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Steve said.

“Can I sit on the counter?”

Steve didn’t feel like going through the process of dealing with what a stupid question this was. He’d been distracted from his dream pretty thoroughly, but he still felt shaky around the edges. Not as confrontational as usual. He just nodded. Bucky pulled himself up on the counter and sat there, studying him.

“You remember what it was about? Your dream.”

“You said you didn’t—I mean.” Steve hesitated. Bucky had only said that he wanted coffee. “It seemed like you didn’t want to talk about it a minute ago.”

“Oh, that’s what you were dreaming about,” Bucky said. He winced. It was one of the longest negative expressions Steve had seen on him since he came back. He was always smiling. Bucky tipped his head down for a minute, then brought it back up. His face smoothed out. “I guess I gotta hear about it, though, if it’s on your mind,” he said.

“You don’t. Not if you don’t want to,” Steve said.

“I don’t like you alone with things,” Bucky said.

“You’ve got some nerve,” Steve said, but he regretted it. He didn’t want to worry at Bucky about telling him things, when he clearly didn’t want to talk about anything. Maybe someday it would get bad, and maybe Sam would say that wasn’t good, problems going underground and exploding out of you; but Bucky wasn’t hurting anyone and had the right to keep quiet as much as he wanted. “Coffee’s ready. You want some?”

“It’s too hot. Let’s wait,” Bucky said. He was always burning his mouth on things and seeming not to care at all about it. “Tell me, okay?”

He looked more serious than he usually did, although maybe it was just that he hadn’t gotten to put himself together. Even though he’d had a minute to mess with his hair, it wasn’t as neat as usual. He was wearing flannel pajama pants and a singlet that exposed some of his upper chest. Steve could see the scars around the base of Bucky’s arm, which he’d only seen in pictures.

Bucky looked at him looking. He winced again, but more imperceptibly.

“Do you remember getting the arm?” Steve asked. “Sorry, you don’t have to answer that.”

“You want to know, though,” Bucky said. Steve didn’t say or do anything; he was doing a piss poor job letting Bucky be private about what had happened. Bucky gave a little nod. “I remember most of it,” he said. “I don’t remember losing the first one in the fall. I remember not having it, I remember when they amputated the rest of it, and I remember when they put on and took off the first arm, and when they put on this one. What else would you like to know?”

His voice sounded too small to be coming out of his body, and he was enunciating more than usual. Steve felt sick; he sensed that he’d really upset Bucky, or done something to him, even though he had never in his life heard Bucky’s voice sound like that. But he just didn’t sound right at all. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Bucky snapped out of it; his eyes brightened and he said in a normal voice, “Hey, Steve, come over and tell me about your dream.” He beckoned for Steve to come closer, and Steve did, trying not to look at the scars. Bucky held Steve’s shoulders and turned him around so that Steve was standing against the counter, with Bucky’s knees on either side of him. Then Bucky wrapped his arms around Steve’s neck from behind, and hugged him. His head dropped a little, his face next to Steve’s face, hanging over his shoulder.

You love your body because it’s yours—but no, Steve thought, he never had, that couldn’t be less true. But that doesn’t mean you always like being touched on a body that isn’t yours. It’s hard because even though people might like your mind, you never know how much they really like the box it comes in; and it’s harder for a less intellectual reason, which is just that things don’t feel the way you expect them to feel.

The point was that with Bucky sitting up on the counter, it felt like he was taller than Steve, that he was having to lean over him to hold him; and Steve liked that more than he could say. He half wanted to thank Bucky for doing it that way, but he could hardly put what it was into words, and he didn’t know if it was on purpose. He squeezed one of Bucky’s hands.

“I just dreamed,” he said, “that everyone was dead and I couldn’t do anything.”

Bucky squeezed him. “You know,” he said slowly, “if they’d gotten what they wanted, they wouldn’t have needed an assassin.”

“I did think of that,” Steve said.

“Not saying you didn’t,” Bucky said. “Just saying, if you hadn’t been there, I’d be dead, not sitting here waiting for coffee.”

“Do you want the coffee now?”

“No, no,” Bucky said, hanging onto him so he couldn’t go, “I’m trying to tell you that you saved me, okay? So just listen.”

“I didn’t really—“ Steve said. He didn’t want to tell Bucky how to feel, but he was thinking he’d rather be dead than be made into what Bucky had, and he’d rather have died than gone through even only the things that were in the file. It wasn’t like he wasn’t happy Bucky was alive now, but he felt selfish for being happy.

“It’s okay,” Bucky said, “if they hadn’t made me they’d have made someone else, so it’s not like I could’ve saved anybody by not going through it. And I don’t remember anything.”

“You don’t? But you’ve told me—“

“Okay, okay, I remember it,” Bucky said impatiently, “but I don’t sit around _remembering_ it, see? It’s over, no point bitching about it now. All it does is make me appreciate how nice things are. They never let me do anything fun, but everything is fun in the future. Do you know about those things, the YouPhones? It’s a telephone _and_ a watch _and_ it plays music.”

“I don’t feel good about using Apple products,” Steve said.

Bucky kissed him on the cheek. He leaned over, a little, and kissed him on the mouth.

He smelled like mothballs and, under that, fruit-flavored toothpaste and yesterday’s hair products. He wasn’t kissing too carefully—his mouth was open and messy and warm. “Oh my God, what are you doing?” Steve said. At first he didn’t move.

“What do you think?” Bucky said. “Might work better if you turn around.”

Steve did turned around, but he stepped back. He was at a loss for words. Bucky didn’t look particularly bothered, just confused.

“What?” he said. “You know I remember everything. You said you wanted to.”

He wasn’t wrong, but it wasn’t exactly something Steve had expected to hear about ever again. He hardly ever even thought about it. He backed away from Bucky, wiping his mouth, and hastily poured himself a cup of coffee. He started drinking it while standing as far away from Bucky as he could while still being in the kitchen. Bucky jumped down from the counter and came over, but he had his hands out. He wasn’t going to make any sudden moves.

“Shit, Steve, I’m sorry,” he said. “Is there someone? I waited and asked Sam—it’s not Sam, is it? I just thought I would have noticed—“

“No, there isn’t anyone,” Steve said. “I just—”

“Oh,” Bucky said. “Oh, sorry.”

He also poured himself some coffee. They both stood there covering their mouths up with cups of coffee. It was three in the morning.

“Steve, I—I can’t imagine what you must—I was really out of line, wasn’t I?” Bucky said.

“It’s okay,” Steve said. “I just—“

“Sorry I can’t take a hint,” Bucky said. “I always have a tendency—“ He half-smiled. “To try and push myself on people when it’s not—“

“Oh, come on,” Steve said. “It’s not remotely like that.” God, the shy act was endearing.

“No, it is. I should have realized you didn’t still want to.”

“Are you joking? I obviously want to—“

“Really?” Bucky looked startled, faintly pleased. He had to pour himself some more coffee because he’d been drinking so fast. Steve was about to be in the same boat.

“Bucky, if you remember, then you remember that you didn’t want to,” Steve said. He was still flustered; he always tried not to think about Bucky that way.

Steve was often tenacious, but when it came to Bucky, he hadn’t been pushy. He’d been careful. He wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t known that Bucky was friends with some of the queer guys in their neighborhood, and if he hadn’t had a suspicion that Bucky went around with them sometimes. It was probably just for something to do, but Bucky was nice to those guys, so Steve could be pretty sure that he wouldn’t be angry or fall out with Steve just because Steve asked.

He hadn’t been angry, but he’d laughed and gone on about how drunk Steve was. Did he need a bucket? He shouldn’t drink so much on an empty stomach. The next day, Steve tried to tell Bucky he wasn’t drunk, and Bucky interrupted him talking about this girl, Jean Keaney, who Steve had had a crush on in grade school. Didn’t Steve like Jean Keaney anymore?

Well no, because he was twenty-two and he’d barely talked to Jean since he was nine. Bucky suggested that Steve should get to know this other girl, Louise. Bucky had gone on a date with Louise and she complained all the time, just like Steve did. Then Bucky asked if it was going to rain. Couldn’t Steve feel it in his joints or something? Then Bucky asked Steve to explained Cubism, which Bucky couldn’t give two shits about. He only liked art that he thought was pretty, and his definition of pretty was about half an inch wide.

Steve wouldn’t pretend that he hadn’t moped about it a little, but he put it out of his mind. Bucky wasn’t mean about it; he just didn’t want to with Steve. Steve barely wanted to with anyone else, so he resolved to stop thinking about it until he met someone else he wanted. And that was what he did.

“We-ell, I wouldn’t say I didn’t _want_ to,” Bucky said. Steve had to focus on Bucky’s scar tissue and everything he’d been through to keep from completely blowing up at him.

“Then what was all that bullshit about Jean Keaney?” he said in a measured tone.

“It didn’t seem practical at the time,” Bucky said. “We were roommates.”

“Are you serious?” Steve said.

“It seemed like it’d be a lot of trouble for you,” Bucky said. “You couldn’t get away with all the stuff I could. Stuff’s easier now. I mean, do what you want, but I think it’d be fun.”

“You said no because we were roommates,” Steve said. “We’re roommates _now_!”

“I reconsidered,” Bucky said. “It’s no skin off my back, just I’m up for it if you want to.”

A few minutes before Bucky had been stammering and practically blushing. Now he’d be sauntering, if it was possible to saunter while standing still. He took a big swallow of coffee and smiled like it was the best tasting thing he’d ever had. It definitely wasn’t; he usually put a lot of cream and sugar in there.

“So, do you want to?” he asked.

“ _Later_ ,” Steve said. “Just give me a few days to get used to it. It’s kind of a shock.”

“How many days?” Bucky said.

“Are we on a deadline?” Steve said. “I waited seventy five years, you can wait a week.”

“A _week_?” Bucky said. “It’s Wednesday. So you’re saying next Wednesday?” His face still looked saunter-y but his hands had started twisting around the coffee cup.

“Okay, Wednesday,” Steve said.

A few minutes later he couldn’t believe he’d said it. The whole conversation had been so strange. He wasn’t the type of person who ever stopped liking someone or something he liked. If Bucky’d had something more convincing to say than, “it’d be fun”—well, Steve couldn’t imagine how he’d react if Bucky confessed a lifelong passion for him, because he couldn’t imagine Bucky would ever _do_ that, would _feel_ that—but, if he ever got over his disbelief, he’d be thrilled to say yes.

But this seemed so out of the blue that he wondered if Bucky would even _want_ to in a week. If he’d even remember the conversation. Oh, you were half asleep, Steve, he’d probably say. Steve wasn’t sure he’d want to get up hopes he’d abandoned years ago, for something that Bucky had apparently just changed his mind about.

Of course, maybe this was just what it was like when Bucky Barnes made a move on you. Steve wouldn’t know. And it made some sense that, if he’d rejected Steve for practical reasons...well, it was true that he was a lot less practical than he used to be. The fact that he’d changed his mind didn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t sincere.

That didn’t mean Steve would be okay, though, if it was only for fun.

They never went back to bed, just started the day early. Before Bucky went in to take a shower he said, “You know I meant it, right? You’ve got nothing to apologize to me for.”

Well, that was nice. Steve had such bad whiplash from their conversation that he’d almost completely forgotten about his dream.


	5. The Wrong Soldier

It turned out that Steve wasn’t good at being realistic. For the next several days he felt hushed and dizzy inside. Something that had turned off when Bucky rejected him, and again when he missed Peggy’s whole life, came roaring back to life inside him. He woke up and instead of getting up like he usually did, he laid around in bed thinking about Bucky and his array of powerful smiles—grins, slow sinister smiles, the new shy looking half smile, the way he laughed doubled up. He thought, though he tried not to, of what possible new expressions he could produce in Bucky if he got the chance. The truth was he barely cared what they did—he’d do anything Bucky wanted, anything he liked. Anything he got to do.

Once the days started it wasn’t so bad, but the mornings were awful. To jerk off or not, after lying around thinking about Bucky—that was the question. If he didn’t, he’d be distracted, but if he did—well, it just seemed strange to go and start eating breakfast with someone you’d just jerked off over. It didn’t seem very polite. Even though he knew how much fun Bucky would make of him for worrying about stuff like that. Usually he went ahead and did it but he always felt like he was going to choke with embarrassment when he came out of his room and Bucky said good morning to him.

Bucky wasn’t helping. In fact, he’d mounted a campaign to make Steve go crazy and it seemed to bring him great happiness. Steve would be looking for a bottle opener when Bucky would say, “Oh, I can open that. Give it here.” Then he would open Steve’s beer with his metal hand, but not in any reasonable way. Steve refused to believe that there was any reason for Bucky to stroke the neck of the bottle the way he did, or for him to insist on taking a drink before handing it to Steve. “Just making sure it’s safe for you,” he said—though if anyone should be taste-testing the other one’s food, it wasn’t Bucky. Steve would start to point that out and then Bucky would pause with his mouth wonderfully curved and smile around the bottle, and he’d suck on it a little, and grin, and give it to Steve.

It wasn’t like it wasn’t effective, which embarrassed Steve because it was so heavy handed. Although Bucky could be heavy handed, sometimes, if that was what would go over with the girl he wanted.

“Hey, Steve, okay if I run the dishwasher?” Bucky asked one morning, and Steve wasn’t sure if he wanted to yell at Bucky for asking such a dumb question or for walking around in pretty much his altogether. He had boxers on but that couldn’t cover more than twenty percent of him, and the remaining eighty percent was putting Steve on the edge of some heart palpitations. Bucky smiled a big sunny smile at him.

“Buck, what do I say about the dishwasher?” Steve managed to croak out.

“I don’t know, that people rely too much on technology these days and you can’t really appreciate your food unless you spend hours elbow deep in hot water? I know you just _loved_ washing dishes at the automat.”

“It wasn’t the job I’ve been most suited for,” Steve admitted.

“No, I think they _wanted_ to hire someone who would faint from the steam and from standing up for too long. All good dishwashers periodically almost fall into the sink and get scalded.”

“Okay, okay,” Steve said. “But this dishwasher, the non human one, is yours because you live here. You don’t have to ask to run it. You don’t have to ask to use the laundry machines. You don’t have to ask to take some quarters out of the bowl for the laundry machines. _It’s your apartment_.”

“Understood. Sorry,” Bucky said and went looking for the capsules of soap that went in the dishwasher. Steve sighed. Bucky leaned over the dishwasher. Steve flattened himself against the wall like he was trying to avoid being hit by an oncoming train.

///

It wasn’t like the whole thing was unpleasant. Steve didn’t mind thinking about Bucky bent over the dishwasher for the next several mornings. It was just a lot to handle in the moment, especially when he’d spent so long training himself not to think about Bucky that way. It was kind of fun to think about it later—debilitating, but fun.

Steve was relieved when Sam came over, most of the way through the week. It was funny to feel like Sam, who he’d known for less than a year, was the grounding force he needed to keep from dying of shyness around his oldest friend.

Although—not exactly surprisingly, but comfortingly—Steve didn’t really feel shy around Bucky when someone else was there. Especially if they were joking around or telling stories, the two of them tended to attach to each other and function as one unit when company was around.

Sam got them off on a good conversational bent while he was trying to show Bucky how to make smoothies. It bothered Steve that Sam could just take out Steve’s blender and start setting it up, while Bucky still asked if Steve minded. But he forgot pretty quickly when Sam started talking about his first exposure to the idea of sex.

Early on, Steve had been really confused when Sam would talk about his childhood. There were so many people in his stories that he seemed to have either belonged to several different families, or else just have had a massive amount of relatives who all kept coming over to stay at his house. Eventually Steve put it together that Sam’s granddad had owned an apartment building, which his dad managed. Because Sam as a kid was cute and hard to lie to, his dad would often bring him along when he went to collect the rent or to ask someone to stop having loud parties.

His granddad couldn’t really take care of a kid, so after school Sam would usually be sent to one of the tenants until his dad came home. When Sam was about eight, this was always one of two women—Crystal, a nurse who worked nights, and who Sam was now surprised to realize had been only in her early twenties, younger than he was now; and Mrs. Rice, an older lady whose adult children and grandchildren were always coming around.

Pretty naturally, since they were the women he knew best, Sam asked them a lot of questions about pregnancy. Someone in the building had had twins recently, and it was always on his mind. An issue arose when Crystal and Mrs. Rice—who didn’t know each other especially well—had massively different ideas about what kids should be told about sex.

“Crystal terrified me,” Sam told them, “absolutely scared the shit out of me by telling me that if you’re really close to someone, and you really love them, that’s how women get pregnant.”

“Oh, no,” Steve said.

“Right!” Sam said. “Because how can you stop your feelings? You might just really love someone you never even talked to and then, bam, you created another person. I got scared to even be around girls. Anyway, Mrs. Rice found out about it and she set me straight, but then she went over and yelled at Crystal. Everyone heard it. Mrs. Rice was crying.”

“Bet that made you feel bad about asking questions,” Bucky said.

“Are you serious?” Steve said. “Kids ask questions, it’s normal. Good for Mrs. Rice standing up for your right to know things. I can’t believe a nurse would do something like that.”

“Steve knew how babies were made pretty much since he _was_ a baby,” Bucky told Sam. “Hold up, you can put peanut butter in that thing?”

“Anything you want,” Sam said, shaking the blender at Bucky. “What do you say to that, old-timer?”

“I love it,” Bucky said, stroking the blender like it was a puppy. “Jesus, all this _stuff_. I’m never gonna be bored again in my life.”

“Yeah, blenders are cool,” Sam said. “I’m sure you’re gonna be bored about something eventually.”

“Oh, you just wait and see,” Bucky said.

“I forgot your mom was a nurse,” Sam said to Steve. Bucky gave Steve a little sideways look, checking up on him. Steve barreled ahead to show he wasn’t going to dissolve in a pile of tears.

“The way my mom taught me stuff,” he said, “was—well, sounds like it was even better than people do nowadays. I hardly even remember having to ask, and I never went through any of those phases of giggling about it like some kids do. I credit my mom for never making it seem scary—I think that’s what makes kids giggle about it.”

“That’s probably so,” Bucky said.

“No way,” Sam said. “You’re probably just weird, Steve. I think kids are pretty much programmed to laugh at all that stuff. I even laughed when Mrs. Rice was telling me about it, even though she was so upset.”

“Not Steve,” Bucky said. “He was always just matter of fact about it, from the time we were kids, told my sisters and me anything we wanted to know. None of us had to go through thinking that you have to pee on someone to have a baby, or ride a motorcycle together.”

“I never heard that one,” Sam said. “I mean, the pee one, yeah, but not the motorcycle.”

“Yeah, kids would go on about it at school and I’d just sit there feeling secure because Steve explained it to me,” Bucky said. “We were all so lucky to have him.”

“Aww,” Sam said.

Steve took a drink of the smoothie they had poured for him, which he didn’t even want. He just felt obligated to make some kind of purposeful movement.

“He doesn’t really like that,” Sam told Bucky.

“I just,” Steve said, “weren’t you kind of angry at me for talking to Becca and Elly about that stuff?”

“No,” Bucky said.

“Yes, you were,” Steve said.

“No, I appreciated it. You were right,” Bucky said. He was getting the flirty smile on—Steve didn’t understand how it fit the context. Was he making fun of Steve?

“Are you making fun of me?” Steve asked.

“No?” Bucky said. His smile didn’t budge, but his forehead bent in puzzlement.

Steve tried again. “Don’t you remember that time when Elly asked if Father Frank had a penis?”

“What?” Sam said.

“Yeah, I remember,” Bucky said, but he kept on looking at Steve with the same blank, half-smiling expression as if Steve hadn’t just proved him wrong.

“You’re gonna have to clue me in,” Sam said. “You’re talking about a priest here?”

“Yeah, Father Frank,” Bucky said. “He came to our parish in, say—’25?” He looked at Steve for confirmation.

“Yeah,” Steve said. There was a pause as he waited for Bucky to tell the story—he was a better talker, and Steve hadn’t known him to struggle with remembering things since he came back. In fact, he seemed to remember better than Steve. Steve would never have been able to say what year Father Frank came to the parish.

But Bucky didn’t say anything, so Steve kept talking.

“Ma was working, so I was sitting with the Barneses at church. A few days before, Elly had started asking me all these questions about the differences between girls and boys. She was about five, so Bucky told me not to, but I just told her because I didn’t see the point of keeping it from her. Then she started asking me endless questions like, ‘Does Bucky have a penis? Does my dad have a penis?’”

“Yeah, that’s five-year-olds,” Sam said.

“I just told her yes. I didn’t think it was a big problem—she was just putting it together. We were walking to church, Bucky kept shushing her, but then he didn’t sit with us because he was an altar boy. As soon as he left, it was like she’d just been waiting for him to leave.”

Steve paused. It was a funny story, but he felt self conscious telling it without Bucky stepping in to add details. Bucky wasn’t really laughing along, either. He had a smile on, but he was watching Steve sort of carefully.

“Well, then what happened?” Sam said. “Did Father Frank have a penis? I’m on the edge of my seat here.”

“Oh,” Steve said, distracted—he’d lost the train of the story if he’d ever had it. “I guess he did. She just asked me if he had one really loudly, and she said it twice, so everyone heard her. Some people were sort of, I guess, scandalized. Bucky’s parents were really embarrassed and he was mad at me.”

The smile stayed on Bucky’s face, but just barely. His whole face went so strange looking that Steve felt like he’d been plunged into a bucket of ice water. Under the smile Bucky looked almost dreadfully calm.

“Never mind,” Steve said.

He didn’t know if Sam hadn’t noticed how Bucky was acting or if he was just trying to keep things normal. Probably he hadn’t noticed—he didn’t have anything to compare Bucky to, except the Winter Soldier who was so visibly different that you couldn’t really compare them. Sam just squinted at Steve for a minute, and shook his head, and asked Bucky what he thought of some reality show or another. Soon Bucky was up and running again like he’d never stopped.

///

When Sam left, Bucky gave him a little sideways hug like he was always doing. He was easy with loving people and showing them. He leaned out into the hallway of Steve’s building to call after Sam—“And stay out!”—and as Sam’s answering laugh dissipated, Bucky moved jauntily back into the front room.

His body went quiet as he turned toward Steve. Steve felt himself going a little quiet, too. The air was still as Steve reached out and closed and locked the door—too loud—and Bucky said, “Did you want to have a word with me?”

“I—“ Steve said, because he’d been expecting more the opposite, that Bucky was mad at him, or had something to tell him. He struggled to talk.

“I’m sorry I was, uh, mad at you,” Bucky said, before Steve could say anything. “I remember what I said to you. Wasn’t right. You were right. You didn’t do anything. I was being—reactionary, like you said.”

Reactionary _was_ the word Steve had used when Bucky was yelling at him about it. At twelve, as at twenty-six, Bucky had been concerned about looking bad in front of other people. What kind of brother was he if he couldn’t keep Elly from saying something like that? He prided himself on looking after his sisters and having people know that he did. “Just because you think nothing matters except your idea of how things should be, that doesn’t mean your _ideas_ can’t screw things up for other people’s actual lives,” he said, or thereabouts.

Steve had thought it was stupid. He still thought it was stupid and would have been not at all hesitant to say so if Bucky would just set himself against Steve, normally, and say Steve was wrong. Instead, he found himself arguing with Bucky in defense of Bucky’s stupid opinion.

“Come on,” he said, “you have to admit you had a point. I had my version of things and I didn’t think about how it might embarrass you or your parents. Or I didn’t think it was important.”

“It wasn’t important,” Bucky said.

“You thought it was,” Steve said.

“Well, I was wrong,” Bucky said. “You always had a longer view than I did. It’s why you make better decisions.”

Steve stared at him. “You never said I make better decisions than you.”

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” Bucky said. He was leaning against the door sort of nonchalantly. It gave the impression that what he was saying might be sarcastic, but Steve didn’t think it was. “It’s why you’re Captain America, right?”

“What?” Steve said. It wasn’t a joke, it definitely wasn’t, and he felt like he’d been slapped. “That doesn’t have to do with me always being right. It doesn’t mean I am.”

“Well—“ Bucky said, and he slid his eyes up and around the ceiling, like he was putting together some delicate words. “Well, maybe you don’t like to say so, but practically, that’s how it works, right? Functionally? If the soldiers don’t do as the captain says then things aren’t going to ruin smoothly. Arguing or getting mad, that’s just going to put a wrench in things.”

Steve didn’t even think Bucky had thought like that in the army—he wasn’t all the way wrong, but it didn’t go as far as he was saying—but—“Bucky, we’re talking about something that happened long before I was Captain America, before you were even in the army.”

“Well, it’s pretty much the same thing, isn’t it?” Bucky said.

“No, it’s not,” Steve said.

“Okay,” Bucky said. “Sorry I misunderstood.”

Steve stared at him before his brain caught, after the fact, on something Bucky had said. “’Functionally.’ ‘Practically.’ You said it works better _functionally_ if you go along with me all the time. Does that mean you think I’m actually wrong? I mean, in that situation with Elly, for example.”

Steve saw how Bucky’s hands went back behind him to grab a piece of molding on the wall. “N-o,” he said slowly. “You were right.”

“Can you explain why I was right?”

Bucky paused. For a second he looked wild eyed, like a trapped animal; then Steve saw a pleasant calm look come down over his face again. He shrugged; the movement was as loose and happy looking as he’d been a few minutes before, when he was saying goodbye to Sam. “Why are we talking about this, anyway?” he said cheerfully. “I just said you were right. You can’t tell me that’s a problem for you.” Steve felt rooted to the spot and to silence; he stood there saying nothing until Bucky moved toward him, solicitous, and said, “Hey, what’s the matter? We’ll figure it out; it’s fine.”

Steve worked his mouth until it said the only thing he could say: “You’re scaring me, Buck.”

Bucky’s eyes widened. He put his palms up and said softly, soothingly, “Please, Steve, don’t be scared; it’s fine, it’s me—whatever I did wrong, I’ll fix it, I promise, but I’m me, I’m not gonna hurt you, I—“

“For Christ’s sake, Bucky, I didn’t mean _that_ ,” Steve almost yelled, and Bucky put his hands down. It was slotting into place in Steve’s head—he put his hands up like he was surrendering; the new half smile, not flirty but pleading; the way he kept moving the goalposts, like he was trying to find the right answer before Steve even realized he’d given the wrong one.

The way he pretended to sleep in the bed Steve had gotten for him, and drank the whiskey that made him sick because Steve had offered it. Steve moved toward Bucky—he didn’t know what he was trying to do, touch his arm or something, comfort him—and Bucky stiffened, pressed himself against the wall. Then he seemed to flinch at his own flinch. His body relaxed and looked happy again, and he said, “Sorry, go ahead.” When Steve didn’t touch him he said, “Seriously. I’m sorry. I’m just tired—didn’t sleep great last night.” Which was the opposite of what he’d said that morning.

“Bucky,” Steve said, and he didn’t even know how to say it; he barely knew how he’d put it into words if he was talking to someone other than Bucky, or writing it down. “I’m not—you didn’t do anything wrong, I promise. But I don’t think you’re doing so good.”

“What are you talking about?” Bucky said. “Things are great.”

Steve sighed. “I don’t—look, Buck, you’re not—” It would startle Bucky again if he said, _you’re not yourself_. “Some of the stuff you think about, it’s...I mean, stuff like always agreeing with me, asking my permission to do things, trying to do what I want all the time—”

“Normal stuff,” Bucky said.

“Buck, we never had that kind of relationship. It wasn’t even like that in the army, and for most of our lives I didn’t have any kind of rank on you at all—we were just kids, you know? You didn’t have to do what I said, I wasn’t in charge of you.”

“Hm,” Bucky said. At least he seemed to be listening to what Steve was saying, and trying to follow along. But shit, he looked like Steve was speaking a foreign language. He was squinting, like he was trying to picture what Steve was describing and coming up short.

“But,” Steve continued, “it’s been a long time since we saw each other. Not to put too fine a point on it, but you were with Hydra and I don’t think you really—had any choices, right? Not about—your hair or anything.” It was a stupid example in the grand scheme of things, but the smaller things had gotten in deeper, maybe.

“Yeah,” Bucky said. “So you’re saying some of the ways I think are—wrong.” He swallowed. “That they’re from the Soldier. Well, I, Bucky was a soldier too, but they’re from the wrong soldier. It’s his thoughts, his instincts, that’s making me be this way.”

He looked rattled. Steve said, guiltily, “Well, it’s not _wrong_. The point is there’s no right or wrong way for you to think. You can think whatever you want.”

It seemed he couldn’t have said it worse. Bucky looked even more rattled; he braced himself on his left hand against the wall, and brought his right hand up to press against the bridge of his nose. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I...I misspoke. I didn’t mean to say it was wrong.” Then, “Fuck! I shouldn’t even be sorry.”

Steve felt horrible. Maybe he should have waited to say something. Maybe Sam could have explained it to Bucky in a more diplomatic way.

Bucky lowered his hand and fixed his gaze on Steve, smiling—well, sort of grimacing. “I can say I’m sorry, though,” he said, “for scaring you and for...putting you in that position. You’re a good person, really good, and I’ve been treating you like you’re Hydra.”

Steve winced. “You don’t have to be sorry,” he said. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to be insulted; it wasn’t like Bucky’d done it on purpose.

“I can be sorry if I want, though,” Bucky said. “Right?”

“Well, yeah,” Steve allowed.

“I didn’t do right by you,” Bucky said, “acting like that”—he was calmer again now, speaking smoothly—“and I’ll just, I’ll figure it out, okay? It just takes time.”

“That’s what I think,” Steve said.

Bucky nodded. “I’m gonna go to bed,” he said, and Steve felt—he almost was about to tell Bucky that he knew about the closet, now that he knew more about what was going on. Maybe Bucky would believe there was no wrong way to do things, if Steve could tell him he didn’t mind Bucky sleeping in the closet.

But Steve didn’t say it—something stopped him before he even started. If there was any way Bucky would feel like he’d been caught doing something bad, Steve wasn’t willing to make him feel that way. It wasn’t for any unselfish reason. He just didn’t want to see Bucky get that trapped look again.


	6. When They Really Get to Know You

As if things weren’t bad enough, the next day was Wednesday and Bucky started trying to give Steve what he wanted. Steve already had had a horrible feeling; his fantasies of trying things with Bucky completely dried up. Those trains of thought didn’t even start. Steve got up as soon as he woke up and he was brushing his teeth in the bathroom when Bucky came in and stood behind him, grinning at him in the mirror. Steve glanced at him, saw that he was naked, and deliberately unfocused his eyes so he wasn’t looking at him. He had this idea that if he just waited, Bucky would leave.

Instead, Bucky pressed his whole body against Steve’s back and reached around to grab his crotch. “ _Stop_ ,” Steve said with his mouth full. He jerked away and spit his toothpaste into the sink. “Stop,” he said more clearly.

Bucky leaned around him to make eye contact. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I don’t want to do it,” Steve said.

“You don’t have to be nervous or anything,” Bucky said reassuringly. “Just relax, okay? I’ll do everything for you. You’ll like it.”

“Bucky, please stop,” Steve said. He felt like he was in a nightmare. His heart was hammering almost out of his chest.

“You don’t have to be nervous,” Bucky repeated. He was stroking Steve’s arm lightly; he’d come around in front of him, still pressed against him, and he tried to pull Steve in to kiss him.

Steve pulled his head back. Bucky squinted at him.

“What?”

“I need you to stop touching me,” Steve said. “Put on some clothes and we’ll talk about it in the kitchen, okay?”

“Oh,” Bucky said. “Okay.”

“You want pancakes?” Steve said when he came out of the bathroom. Bucky was sitting at the table wearing cargo shorts and a white t-shirt. It wasn’t really a Bucky-quality outfit. He used his metal hand to comb back the long part of his hair.

“Okay,” he said.

“You want anything in them?” Steve asked. Bucky looked at him helplessly. “Never mind,” Steve said. “I was going to put some cranberries in—can you eat those?” Bucky nodded.

Steve was putting a bowl of frozen cranberries in the microwave when Bucky said, “It’s the arm, right?”

“What?”

“I’m sorry I can’t take it off, but you have to admit a stump would be even more distracting. Not to mention the logistical problems.”

Steve leaned against the counter and poured the pancake mix into the suggested amount of water. He wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be done in that order. “It’s not the arm,” he said.

“I noticed the scars bother you, but I came up behind you so you wouldn’t have to look at them. So that can’t be it,” Bucky said.

“It’s not, uh—it’s not anything about you,” Steve said. “I just don’t want to.”

“You wanted to a week ago,” Bucky said. “Why don’t you want to anymore?” Steve pretended he was mixing the batter and cranberries very carefully and couldn’t look up at Bucky. Bucky sighed. “Look, Steve, if there’s anything I’m doing wrong, just say the word and I’ll change it, okay? Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

“What’s Rome in this scenario?” Steve said. “Okay, look.” He put the bowl down and sat down across the table from Bucky.

“What happened to the pancakes?” Bucky said.

“I’ll get to them in a minute,” Steve said. “I don’t, um—“ It all seemed impossible to talk about. Fortunately, there was a napkin on the table that Steve was able to fiddle with as he talked. “Bucky,” he said, “you know what we were talking about yesterday, about how you—tend to say yes to things, and—you know, how you still have a lot of programming—”

“I said I was sorry,” Bucky said.

“It’s not...Bucky,” Steve said. “I just, I don’t want to fool around when there’s still—programming, because—I mean, how am I supposed to know if you actually want to when there’s still programming in there?”

Bucky stared at him. “What are you talking about? You think Hydra programmed me to try and seduce people?”

Steve was embarrassed. “No, not really,” he said.

“Or what, you think I was some kind of fairy for the Hydra guys to use?” Bucky snorted. “Believe me, they put way too much effort into building me to unthaw me just for sex.” Steve must have looked a little startled because Bucky solemned up his expression and reached over to take Steve’s hand. “I promise you, nothing like that ever went on between me and them,” he said.

Then he started stroking Steve’s palm, and Steve gripped his hand harder to stop him. “Look,” he said. “If you really want to—“

“I do,” Bucky said.

“Then tell me why you want to,” Steve said.

Bucky’s eyes flashed. He ripped his hand away and snarled, “That’s not fair. What is this, twenty questions?”

“Bucky, you can’t expect me to go along with it when you’re just trying to do what I want,” Steve said. “That isn’t my kind of thing, that’s all, and you just—the way you’re doing right now, maybe you _can’t_ know what you want—”

“So let me get this straight,” Bucky said. “You won’t because you think I can’t want it because I agree with you too much. So if I disagree more, will you let me?”

Steve couldn’t help laughing, in a strangled kind of way.

“Well, that’s the problem, right? How much do I have to disagree with you for you to think that I can want this?”

“Buck, the point isn’t how much you disagree, it’s that you do it when you want to.”

“How much,” Bucky said.

“There is no how much!”

“Well, that’s completely unfair,” Bucky said. “You’re punishing me for not being able to figure out what you want, when you’re saying what you want is for me to want things, which you just said I can’t do.”

“No one’s punishing you, Buck,” Steve said.

“Oh, saying I’m not good enough for you because I can’t _want_ it—that’s something I’m supposed to just lie down and take?” Bucky said “want” like it was some stupid made up word. He counted off on his fingers. “You wanted me before—I don’t look that different, and I could be more like that if you want. I’ll do anything you ask—I can figure it out _before_ you ask, even, I bet. I’m pretty observant. I can be however you want but that’s not enough because I can’t _want_ it? Could you be any more fucking confusing? At least Hydra were pretty straight with me about mission objectives.”

“Jesus,” Steve said. Another laugh stumbled out of him.

“They were—it wasn’t _nice_. I didn’t always _want to do it_ ”—Bucky rolled his eyes—“as a matter of fact, I’ve never liked killing people, but I knew which way my bread was buttered, so I did it. At least I had a way to not be in trouble, but you’re not letting me. You’re saying I have to be in trouble with you because I can’t want things.”

“You’re not in trouble, though,” Steve said.

“Oh, fuck you,” Bucky said. He banged to his feet. “Aren’t you special. Showing what a good person you are all the time, saying you never meant for this to happen, you never _meant_ for him to die, you never meant for him to be like this.” He laughed. “Never _wanted_ it. Must fucking hurt you inside, being so pure and above everybody, _wanting_ stuff.”

He stomped down the hall and into the bathroom. A minute later something metal came flying out into the hallway floor. Steve went over to see what it was.

It was his electric razor. The hall carpet had broken its fall so despite being thrown pretty hard, it hadn’t come apart. Bucky came out of the bathroom, picked up the razor, turned it on, and held it against his head. Then he moved toward Steve.

Steve stood still against the wall and waited for Bucky. Bucky put the buzzing razor next to Steve’s ear. He leaned close—Steve was afraid Bucky was going to try to kiss him again, but instead he just said, loud and close enough to be heard above the buzz, “All that chatter—I heard you, in the base. About what the chair _feels_ like, about—like you’re just dying to know what it was like for me—”

“I am, Buck,” Steve said quietly.

He couldn’t hear himself and he didn’t know whether Bucky did. “Didn’t you ever think about what it _sounded_ like?”

“Oh,” Steve said. “No, I didn’t.”

Bucky dropped the razor and it turned off. The quietness made Steve’s ears ring, more so when Bucky said softly, almost gently, “Steve. How come you made me put this next to my head?”

“I really didn’t know,” Steve said, trying to keep his voice even. “Didn’t know you couldn’t argue, didn’t realize it reminded you of the chair. It’s okay if you don’t believe me, but it’s true—I’d never do anything that would make you scared.”

“ _Scared_ ,” Bucky said, laughing like it was another made up word.

“Why’d you think I did it?” Steve said.

“Oh, you know,” Bucky said. He leaned back against the bathroom doorway with his hands in his pockets. “Just to test me. To make sure I’ll do what you tell me to even if it’s hard. Seems stupid now,” he said, laughing again. “Fuck, I really can’t come back from this, can I?”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Steve said.

“Well,” Bucky said, “you already know I’m not the original Bucky.”

“Yeah, you slipped up on your pronouns earlier,” Steve said.

“You should be a detective,” Bucky said.

“So what,” Steve said. “If you’re not Bucky, you look a lot like him. You his clone or something?”

“Oh, no,” Bucky said. “Just his ghost.”

“Oh, so you’re being poetic,” Steve said.

“Don’t try to be funny,” Bucky said briskly, “it’ll never be as funny to you as it is to me. You left him to die, after all.”

Steve waited. Bucky was waiting for him to speak, too, and when Steve didn’t talk he got angrier.

“I was being nice last week,” he said, “when I said that it wasn’t your fault, that you shouldn’t have to feel bad about what happened. I just didn’t want you to be upset.”

“I thought maybe,” Steve said.

“It took him a long time to die,” Bucky said. “He died hating you.” He grinned crookedly. “Of course, _I’m_ not mad,” he said. “Doesn’t bother me. You probably had something real important to do. But Bucky believed you were coming back for him. Kept trying to escape, kept trying to fight—until it sunk in that no one was coming to help him. Oh, boy, he hated your _guts_ when he realized you forgot him.”

Steve was just standing against the wall when Bucky lunged for him, laughing. It wasn’t aggressive, really; it was like he was going to tickle him. But Steve flinched, and Bucky laughed and laughed at that.

“Well, that’s enough talk,” Bucky said. “I’m going out. Permission to leave? Permission to leave?” When Steve didn’t answer, Bucky leaned closer and said it again. “Permission to leave? Permission to leave? Permission to leave?”

“Granted,” Steve said.

“Aren’t you nice,” Bucky said. He went in the living room and Steve heard him putting his shoes and jacket on and going out the door. He was whistling loudly.

Steve just sat down on the floor in the hallway. Getting a chair didn’t seem important. He knew with his metabolism he needed to eat something, but it didn’t seem important either.

He figured it was better to know. This had to be better than waiting for the other shoe to drop. It could have taken a lot longer, and that would have been worse. What if they’d actually—he was lucky, really lucky, to have learned the truth when he did.

Eventually he pulled himself together and went in the kitchen. The batter had gotten sort of gluey, but the pancakes were edible. He was eating the end of the last batch when Bucky came back. He banged in and stood there looking at Steve awkwardly. “Steve, you don’t look so good,” he said.

“I’m fine,” Steve said.

“Can I sit?” Bucky asked. Steve nodded and Bucky sat down at the table. He took a bunch of candy bars out of his pockets and put them on the table with his gloves.

“I wasn’t. Sure if you were coming back,” Steve said.

“But I left all my stuff here,” Bucky said. He started unwrapping one of his candy bars. “Do you want me to leave? I—” He laughed. “Well, I’ll stay if you want me to stay, and I’ll leave if you want me to leave—you know how _I_ am.” He glanced at Steve. “Well?”

Steve couldn’t say anything.

“I’m sorry about what I said,” Bucky said. “It wasn’t exactly true. I mean, he loved you. He didn’t mean those things that he thought.”

“I don’t blame him if he did,” Steve said.

“Aw, Jesus. It’s not so bad,” Bucky said. “I never wanted to upset you, you got to believe me—” He reached out to take Steve’s hand.

Steve pulled his hand back. “Don’t touch me,” he said. “Thanks.”

Bucky’s mouth firmed up. “Fair enough,” he said.

“Can I have one of your candy bars?” Steve asked.

“Sure can,” Bucky said. He pushed it across the table.


	7. Notes & Warnings

I have a tendency to write overly long warnings and notes, and I don’t like the way they break up the story. So, here’s the plan:

1\. For specific things I will warn at the beginning of the chapter: “warning animal death” or something like that.

2\. I’ll just describe the major “thematic elements” here, and you can decide if you want to read the story. I will not be specifically warning for them since they are in every chapter.

First of all, the main thrust of the story has to do with gallows humor, particularly that Bucky often jokes about awful things he’s had done to him and that Steve learns to join him in doing this. There’s also a major theme of dehumanization, and regular references to torture, mutilation, injury, and death (some of them delivered in an intentionally shocking & slapstick way). There’s one detailed description of a past rape, which I’ll warn for specifically.

There’s a lot of worrying about consent, and whether Bucky really wants to have sex with Steve or is just trying to please him. (Bucky has developed issues with relating to people as equals, since he has been controlled for so long; he tends to be agreeable and very eager to please.) Bucky becomes very pushy, and then angry and confrontational, when Steve “rejects” him because of his concerns. But when they later begin a sexual relationship, it’s genuinely consensual.

Plus, the characters’ bad qualities remain pretty entrenched, the sex is not that sexy, and the focus is on friendship and not romance. Although that’s more a “this might not be what you’re looking for” warning.

Let me know here if you would like me to warn for something else (in a specific chapter or for the whole story), or describe plot elements in more detail.


End file.
